THE MAN IN THE TREE
Damon Knight
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition/January 1984
Cover illustration by Carl Lundgren.
ISBN: 0-425-06006-3
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
I have taken some liberties with geography in this novel, but Dog River, Oregon, exists, although it is no longer called by that name. There really is such a place as the Lost Forest, and it really is not on most maps.
I wish to acknowledge my debt to the authors of two books not mentioned in the text: Jesus the Magician, by Morton Smith (Harper. 1978), and The Trial and Death of Jesus, by Haim Cohn (Harper,1971).
D.K.
To
AMIT and MAGGIE GOSWAMI
The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye
slew and hanged on a tree.
Acts, 5:30
Now I Joseph was walking, and I walked not. And
I looked up to the air and saw the air in amazement.
And I looked up to the pole of the heaven and saw it
standing still, and the fowls of the heaven without
motion. And I looked upon the earth and saw a dish
set, and workmen lying by it, and their hands were in
the dish: and they that were chewing chewed not, and
they that were lifting the food lifted it not, and they
that put it to their mouth put it not thereto, but the
faces of all of them were looking upward. And
behold there were sheep being driven, and they went
not forward but stood still; and the shepherd lifted
his hand to smite them with his staff, and his hand
remained up. And I looked upon the stream of the
river and saw the mouths of the kids upon the water
and they drank not. And of a sudden all things
moved onward in their course.
Book of James, or Protevangelium, XVIII:2
Chapter One
When I was young we were giants' captives.
They stripped us, tortured us with facecloths,
Left us to endure alone
The moonwashed branches on the windows
In the long clock-ticking night.
We voyaged deep under that black ocean
Where Earth eats her daughters in silence,
And always returned. By day we had red-jam smiles,
Breadcrumb fingers, corn hair.
In our pockets were stones, gray string, nails
Scavenged as we went. We knew the secret
Undersides of things, the roofs of tables.
Only insects were smaller than ourselves.
We caught locusts and made them spit tobacco,
Poured dust on pismires, puffed ladybirds away.
We dreamed of being smaller stilclass="underline" built pebble fences,
Roads in dirt, peered with one eye
Under green blades. All Eden was
Our afternoon. It was the time before
They taught us time: before we knew.
--Gene Anderson
Before he was born he remembered the darkness and the light. The darkness was the color of old blood, and in it there were drifting shapes that were not stars.
He remembered the doctor's face -- he had plump cheeks and a ragged black mustache -- and a voice saying: "My gosh, he's a big one, isn't he?"
When he was four, he told his mother some of the things he could remember; later he heard her saying to his father, "What an imagination Gene has." But she was thinking, What a strange child.
By the time he learned to walk, he was already too large for infants' clothing, and his mother had to buy shoes for him at the boys' store. His father, who was worried about money then, said that he had taken up the wrong trade; he should have been a cobbler.
The Andersons lived in a small town called Dog River in northern Oregon. It was the only world Gene knew, and he did not understand then how pure the air and water were, how blue the sky. From their yard he could see two snowcapped mountains, Hood and Adams.
From the time Gene was very young he could glimpse the other worlds that were all around him; in some of these worlds, things were just the same as they were here, and in some they were different. He was not more than two when he found out how to reach with his mind into another world and turn it. He could put a marble on the floor, for instance, and then reach into another world where the marble was in a slightly different place, and bring it into this world: then there would be two marbles. He was four when he first realized that other people could not do this.
One afternoon he was turning somersaults on the lawn with Zelda Owens' little brother Danny, mesmerized by the stiff grass-blades against his forehead, the green sun-warmed smell, and the surprising way the world turned to thump him on the back. Danny was looking for something in the grass, tearing out big clumps with his fingers. He was crying. Gene asked him what the matter was, and he said he had lost his nickel.
"Why don't you make it come back?" Gene asked. Danny did not seem to understand; he kept on beating the lawn with his hands, pulling up grass and dirt. Gene gave him a nickel to make him stop crying, and then Danny said it was his nickel and that Gene had stolen it, and ran into the house to tell his mother.
Later that day, on Zelda's porch, Zelda and Petie Everett were playing "Can you do this?" Zelda could wriggle her ears and cross her eyes; Petie could make a noise like a cork by putting his finger into his mouth and pulling it out again, and he could bend his thumb back until it touched his arm. Gene could not do any of these things, but he said, "Can you do this?"
A beetle was crawling across the warped yellow boards of the porch. Gene knelt and put his finger in front of it to make it change direction. Then he reached into the shadows and found the place where it could just as easily have gone the other way. Gene turned it there, and then there were two beetles. He turned the beetle again, and now there were three, crawling away from each other as fast as they could.
Zelda and Petie were crouching beside him. Petie said, "Aw, that ain't nothing. You had them in your hand."
They argued about this, and Gene lost because he was outnumbered. When he left, Zelda and Petie were shouting, "Liar, liar, your pants on fire!"
One day when Gene was five, after a hard morning rain, he was sailing walnut boats in the gutter. When he tired of this, he brought a bucket full of dirt from the garden and made dams. The mud washed away, but he built the dams up again with twigs and straw, and sent his boats down the stream to watch them tip over the dams and spin in the whirlpools.
A boy he didn't know came down the street carrying a long stick. Before Gene realized what he was doing, he had broken one of the dams. "Don't do that," Gene said, but already the boy was breaking another one.
Gene got up and rushed at him; he was the taller, although the other boy was two years older. The boy jabbed him with his stick and danced away; Gene could not get near enough to hit him. The boy broke the last of the dams and then hit him with the stick again; Gene was crying with anger and pain. At that moment he felt with his mind where the nerves and muscles of the other boy's arm were; he reached in and turned them in a way he had never done before. The stick fell. Gene picked it up and began to beat the other boy, who ran away crying.
That evening the boy's father brought him to Gene's house with his right arm in a sling; he said the boy's arm was paralyzed because Gene had hit him on the shoulder. He was very angry, and shouted at Gene's father. Gene denied everything, but he was frightened, and he reached in again to make the boy's arm well. When the father saw him moving his arm, his face changed, and he took the boy away.